Throwback Thursday: The Muppets (2011)

Usually on Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm going to focus today's TBT piece on the Muppets' return to the big screen after a 12-year absence, due to next Tuesday's premiere of The Muppets on ABC.

Network TV appears to be in such a sorry state this fall--original content on either streaming services or cable is where it's at these days--that the only new network comedy I'm looking forward to is ABC's The Muppets, which is being billed as "a more adult Muppet Show" (wait a minute, we've already had a more adult Muppet Show: it was called The Larry Sanders Show). As much as I love the film that was both the first Muppet feature film I ever saw and my unlikely gateway into the caper genre, the Jim Henson-directed, partially Jay Tarses-scripted Great Muppet Caper--it's my favorite of the Muppet feature films and a film subsequent Muppet films haven't surpassed, not even 2011's well-received The Muppets--TV, the medium the Muppets were created for, is where they work best and are at their funniest. I'm talking episodic TV, not movie-of-the-week TV, which was where Kermit the Frog and company spent most of the 2000s (and disappointed the franchise's most die-hard fans by starring in TV-movies like the poorly received Muppets' Wizard of Oz). Like the A.V. Club's resident Muppets fan, Erik Adams, said last year, a new take on The Muppet Show would give the Muppets' writers and puppeteers the proper space to stretch their ambitions and allow the franchise's gargantuan cast of characters to shine again in a format that's not as cramped as a two-hour movie.

But I have one huge reservation about this new weekly Muppet comedy from showrunners Bill Prady, the Big Bang Theory co-creator who got his start working for the late Henson, and Bob Kushell, and that would be the show's rehash of the confessional/mockumentary format that was popularized by The Office, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. It's such a tired format these days that even Modern Family is starting to find ways to break away from the format, like when it told an entire story using nothing but Skype chats last season. No matter how many times Gonzo points out the tiredness of the confessional gimmick, I really wish the Prady/Kushell show would phase out the confessionals because much of the Muppet characters' appeal is due to their timelessness, and the confessionals scream out 2005.

Timelessness is also integral to why Flight of the Conchords episode director James Bobin's 2011 big-screen reboot works so well, despite occasional missteps like the film's ill-advised needle drop of Starship's 1985 radio hit "We Built This City," an anthem about maintaining the "purity" of rock n' roll that neither rocks nor rolls. Although I'm not a fan of musicals, I would rather hear another musical number written by Flight of the Conchords star Bret McKenzie--who won a Best Original Song Oscar for penning the film's clever and very Conchords-ish number "Man or Muppet"--than have to endure "We Built This City" again.



References to anger management classes and the crassness of reality TV (and terrible Starship songs) aside, Bobin's The Muppets could have come out of 1981 or 1991. There was a lot of grumbling to the press from Muppet project veterans like the retired Frank Oz about Bobin's movie before its release. They felt (no pun intended) the screenplay by lead actor Jason Segel and his writing partner Nicholas Stoller disrespected the Muppet characters by having them tell fart jokes or experience Martin-and-Lewis-ish bitter feuds. The film's story has Segel's character and his Muppet Show-loving little brother Walter, a new Muppet character voiced and performed by Peter Linz, helping Kermit (Steve Whitmire, whose most sublime bit of Muppet acting in the film has to be the distraught expression his hand gives to Kermit's face when he finds out Miss Piggy kidnapped Jack Black) to get the other stars of The Muppet Show back together after years of estrangement and unfulfilling jobs away from the limelight.

A bit of the old guard's skepticism about Segel and Stoller's screenplay is understandable because, conceptually, their screenplay is on the creaky side. Much of it is a rehash of the "Muppets put on a show to stop a greedy developer from tearing down their theater" story from 2002's made-for-TV It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, which starred Joan Cusack as the greedy developer instead of Chris Cooper, who--despite being trained to rap by McKenzie, a skilled Beastie Boys parodist who once proved he could flow on Conchords, for a brief number where his villain character raps about himself--should never ever rap on screen again.

But otherwise, Segel, Stoller and Bobin take that "Muppets reunite to put on a show" premise and make it a timeless and effective way to reintroduce the Muppets and get a new generation of viewers to understand why the Muppets' irreverence and warmth were a big deal to those of us who grew up watching The Great Muppet Caper repeatedly or enjoying The Muppet Show and either its shtick involving Animal (the description of Animal's untold backstory in ego trip's Big Book of Racism! is hilarious: "Drunk, inarticulate and wilder than Tijuana on a Jerry Springer celebrity spring break--naturally, he's Mexican") or its various musical numbers. One of those numbers was the show's cover of Piero Umiliani's "Mah Na Mah Na," a nonsense song that resurfaces in the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie's end credits and is notorious for originating not as a Muppet Show number but as an original song during the 1968 Italian softcore porno Svezia, inferno e paradiso (Swedish: Heaven and Hell).



How else should the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie have reintroduced the Muppets? Put them through another half-baked parody like a Wizard of Oz remake? The "Muppets never grow apart or do fart jokes" complaints strike me as very "Gene Roddenberry won't allow the Enterprise-D officers to get into conflicts with each other"-ish. The skeptical Muppet veterans were wrong about Segel, Stoller and Bobin being too crass and cynical in their approach to bringing back the Muppets. In fact, I think Segel, Stoller and Bobin were so reverent at times about honoring the most beloved of Muppet movies, 1979's sweet-natured Muppet Movie, and pleasing the old guard (plus the Disney execs) that their movie doesn't have enough terrific little "whoa, how did that get snuck into a family film?" gags like Janice's random aside in The Great Muppet Caper about her past ("And I said, 'Look, Mother, it's my life, okeeey? So if I want to live on a beach and walk around naked...' Oh").

Fortunately, Segel, Stoller and Bobin didn't do away with the self-aware dialogue that's classic Muppets ("Didn't you see our first movie? We drive") or the occasional jokes only a few adults in the audience will understand, like the Muppets showing up on the cover of Ebony on a wall in Kermit's mansion or Rashida Jones threatening Kermit with "I will rerun Benson if I have to." I'm sure that line led to a lot of kids in the audience saying, "Mommy, who's Benson?" Segel, Stoller and Bobin also came up with the first moment in a Muppet movie that genuinely moved me and nearly made me tear up:

Whoops, not that scene. This scene:

The Muppets is noteworthy for being the first Muppet movie to take The Muppet Show and all its episodes and make them a pivotal part of the storyline. While Kermit's discovery of the crowds of fans waiting outside the Muppet Theater nearly made me tear up, some Muppet Show fans have said the film's archival audio clip of Kermit introducing guest star Bob Hope was the part of the film that first made them emotional.

That's how beloved The Muppet Show is as a variety show (variety is, by the way, a long-dead-in-America genre Neil Patrick Harris is attempting to bring back to American network TV this fall with NBC's Best Time Ever, which is loosely based on Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway from the U.K.), and the show receives a satisfying tribute in the form of The Muppets, the most enjoyable comedy movie about a variety show since 1982's My Favorite Year, director Richard Benjamin's thinly veiled movie about the making of Your Show of Shows. The Muppet Show was such a huge part of my childhood that words like "Time once again for Veterinarian's Hospital, the continuing story of a quack who has gone to the dogs" are easier for me to remember than any of the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Parks and Recreation (2009-2015)

The last remaining show on NBC that was from the great underwatched Thursday night sitcom lineup that lasted on that network from 2009 to 2013 (the other shows on that lineup: The Office, 30 Rock and, of course, Community, now a Yahoo Screen show), Parks and Recreation takes a bittersweet bow tonight. It's a bow made even more bittersweet by the death of Harris Wittels, one of Parks and Rec's key writers, a week before the airing of the series finale. He was one of many staffers who appeared on the show as examples of the countless crazies who make up Pawnee, Indiana, the show's setting: in Wittels' case, he played Harris the frequently stoned animal control employee. Some feminists hated Wittels for outspoken things he said about free speech that they found to be offensive, while both men and women in the comedy community--particularly anyone from the Parks and Rec fam--adored him and his joke writing, whether on Twitter (a great example of a Wittels tweet: "I don't know if there's a god or not, but I will say this: Cap'n Crunch Oops All Berries is bomb as fuck") or for Parks and Rec.

A special tribute to Wittels from his Parks and Rec colleagues has been tacked on to tonight's hour-long Parks and Rec series finale. The skewed sensibility of writers like Wittels, Megan Amram, Alan Yang, Aisha Muharrar, Joe Mande, Chelsea Peretti and, of course, Parks and Rec co-creator/showrunner Michael Schur helped make Schur's show about small-town government stand out as a small-town comedy. There are small-town comedies like The Andy Griffith Show that older generations of TV viewers tend to love for their likability and warmth, and then there are small-town comedies like the later seasons of Newhart and Parks and Rec--well, actually seasons 2 to 7 of Parks and Rec, to be exact--that are on another level of humor and aren't just merely likable and warm. Post-season 2 Newhart and Parks and Rec are also crazy as fuck. And underneath Parks and Rec's warmth lurks an often biting view of politics outside the world of Pawnee, reflected in its portrayal of the crazy politics within Pawnee.

I always liked how Parks and Rec is basically The West Wing for comedy nerds whose political ideologies echo The West Wing's but who have grown sort of jaded about politics since that older show's demise and have found several of The West Wing's frequently parodied speeches to be too hokey and Hollywood-slick to take seriously anymore (West Wing alum Rob Lowe was even part of the Parks and Rec cast for most of its run, and when Bradley Whitford showed up as a Parks and Rec guest star, that was another enjoyable little collision between the West Wing and Parks and Rec casts). Parks and Rec's idealism was tinged with a satirist's sharp-eyed view of the absurdities of things like government infighting, corporate doublespeak (like whenever Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope had to deal with the local candy manufacturer Sweetums) and this season, Silicon Valley office culture. Speaking of which, both the presence of the fictional Bay Area startup Gryzzl in Pawnee and a three-year time jump--which should have sunk the show but didn't--have resulted in an extremely enjoyable final season full of futuristic sight gags and pause button-worthy Easter eggs, an additional treat on top of Poehler finally getting her longtime wish for Bill Murray to play Pawnee's long-unseen mayor, all the show's longtime threads getting paid off with well-earned emotional moments (Donna tricks everyone into finally calling Jerry by his original name: Garry!) and all the hilarious side characters, from Jean-Ralphio to those accountant dudes who are always seen fangirling over the presence of their former colleague Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), taking a final bow. My favorite pause button-worthy season 7 Easter egg would have to be this, an exhibit at the William Henry Harrison Museum that displays all the cool things about the alternate reality where President Harrison didn't die 30 days into his presidency:

These other season 7 Easter eggs were pretty funny too:

(Photo source: Warming Glow)

By the way, why have I left out season 1 of Parks and Rec? Like so many other sitcoms, the show hadn't quite found its voice yet in that abbreviated first season. Parks and Rec's second season led to one of the greatest course corrections of any sitcom since the transformation of The Odd Couple from a strangely airless retread of the 1968 Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon movie version in the single-camera format to a livelier, funnier and sharper buddy comedy energized by its switch to the multi-cam format.

That course correction mostly had to do with tweaking the heroine at the heart of Parks and Rec, Leslie, via the writers' wise move of changing her from a drab Michael Scott clone to a hyper-competent Tracy Flick type, but without a class-conscious chip on her shoulder and with a ton of friends who will take a bullet for her, whether it's that "beautiful tropical fish" Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), Ben, Leslie's soulmate and now husband, or breakfast food-loving libertarian Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), Leslie's mentor (and occasional adversary, ideology-wise). Rewriting Leslie into the straight-woman figure we know and love today shouldn't have worked, but it totally did. And that--along with the fully realized, Springfield-esque universe that surrounds Leslie--is why we have six great seasons of Parks and Rec (although some will argue that seasons 5 and 6 were when the show stumbled creatively a bit), all coming to an end tonight.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Awesomes, "Euro-Awesomes"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

If The Tick was the Seinfeld of the superhero comedy genre (as was the hangout sitcom No Heroics during its brief run in the U.K.), then The Awesomes is the Get Smart of the genre: each week, the bumbling lead character manages to save the day despite his ineptitude, and often due to the help of his work family. But while Maxwell Smart's bumbling ways stemmed from his arrogance and ego, the physically frail Professor Dr. Jeremy Awesome's bumbling ways (as a combatant and an actual superhero, that is, not as a leader/strategist, which he's far better at doing) are due to a low self-esteem instilled by an unsupportive and distant father. If Prock had taught himself to be more assertive towards the currently absent-from-Earth and retired Mr. Awesome (Steve Higgins), who spent much of his time as a dad supporting his protégé Perfect Man (Josh Meyers) and belittling Prock (either due to Prock not being as perfect as Perfect Man or Prock not listening to his doctors' warnings to not use his secret time-freezing superpower because it gives him nosebleeds within seconds), you can damn well bet that Prock would be frequently Zack Morrising the world to move frozen people and objects around (like he did on Earth 4 during "It's a Mad Mad Mad Parallel World") instead of using that power only to talk to himself.

Manipulating time is a power anyone, including myself, would want to have, which is why Prock's inability to appreciate his ability and figure out how to make proper use of it (or how to work around the pain chronokinesis gives him) is both amusing and infuriating. So when Prock's mentor-turned-nemesis Dr. Terfenpeltz (Bobby Moynihan) points out to Prock that he's not using his time-freezing power to its fullest potential in "Euro-Awesomes," I thought to myself, "Word." The evil scientist is basically voicing the frustrations of Awesomes viewers like myself who can think of a million things to do with time-freezing if it were possible and also wish that Prock would be a little less intimidated by his own chronokinetic power, even though it does turn his nose into a Ragú ad.

Prock finally figures out how to use that power to defeat somebody: in this case, Dr. Terfenpeltz, who wants to collect superheroes' powers to conquer the world (Prock tricks Dr. Terfenpeltz by allowing him to absorb his chronokinetic power and then withholding from him the caveat that chronokinesis is painful). While it's nice to see some progress in Prock's struggles with time-freezing, it'd be wise for The Awesomes to continue having Prock learn something new about his powers every once in a while (his other power is the ability to block Dr. Malocchio's mind control) because Prock wouldn't be as interesting anymore if he became more like Perfect Man, who, by the way, has been far from perfect lately (both having to hide at Awesome Mountain from the law and being unable to do superhero things out in the streets like he used to do are driving Perfect Man crazy and causing him to talk to basketballs as if they were Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away). Much of what made The Greatest American Hero unique--as well as, frankly, more enjoyable than the character of Superman, whom a rather deluded-at-the-time DC Comics thought The Greatest American Hero was ripping off--was Ralph Hinkley's often klutzy attempts to be a hero without the supersuit instruction manual he kept losing. As we see during DVD or Hulu rewatches of that old Stephen J. Cannell show and now the storylines for both Prock and the disheveled Perfect Man in "Euro-Awesomes," a hero who's imperfect or always learning makes for better storytelling than a super-perfect man who's always got it together.

There's also some progress in Prock's love life during "Euro-Awesomes," as he realizes his current girlfriend Jaclyn Stone (Amy Poehler) is no Hotwire (Rashida Jones), and both he and Hotwire, who developed feelings for Prock during her time as a mole working for her evil dad Malocchio, finally get the guts to kiss each other. While it's good that The Awesomes doesn't have to prolong Hotwire's Metal Fella arc anymore now that everyone on the team finally knows she's alive and has been pretending to be Metal Fella because of her guilt over betraying them, I'll miss her terrible impression of a male superhero because it gave Jones more to play than just the sexy mole/love interest.

Even though The Awesomes is a comedy, it takes its action scenes seriously, just like the original Get Smart did (despite Max's klutziness and what has to be the whitest white-guy walk in TV history, Don Adams--or his occasional stunt double--did an awful lot of hitting and running and jumping and clinging to the tops of cars). The climactic battle where Dr. Terfenpeltz's giant mecha absorbs the powers of both the Awesomes and their European counterparts is nicely visualized and reminiscent of the Super-Skrulls from various Marvel titles and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

Another treat in "Euro-Awesomes," which was written by DC Comics veteran and Awesomes staff writer Judd Winick, is its gags about Euro superteams like Justice League Europe and Excalibur (a British offshoot of the X-Men), which are the most Judd Winick-y part of the episode. The cleverest creation out of all the Euro counterparts Winick and the other writers came up with has to be Mademoiselle Hunchback, an icy French beauty who transforms into Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame when she Hulks out and plays hard to get in front of a smitten Impresario when she's in her more conventionally feminine form. You got to love how of all the superhuman forms she could have taken, like maybe a She-Hulk physique, a crystalline-armored body or a wolf, she prefers to change into Charles Laughton.

Mr. Awesome let Prock down as a parent, and now Dr. Terfenpeltz, the father figure who, unlike Mr. Awesome, could have helped Prock to become the genuine superhero he'd prefer to be instead of a mere lawyer/doctor/thinker/delegator, has let him down too. "Euro-Awesomes" doesn't brood over these father figures who keep disappointing Prock, but this history of underwhelming father figures is kind of depressing when you think about it, and it's where The Awesomes gets unexpectedly sad (and maybe even tragic) in a way that Get Smart couldn't because '60s sitcoms were incapable of depth and dark humor (aside from that one time when KAOS murdered a secretary by drowning her in a phone booth, which struck me as really dark back when I was a kid discovering Get Smart reruns in the '80s). My advice to Prock?: Stop looking for a father figure. That "Ask Dad, He Knows" cigarette ad sign young George Bailey saw in It's a Wonderful Life got it half-wrong. Dad doesn't always fucking know. Maybe the newly reformed Hotwire will be that long-sought-after figure who boosts Prock's self-esteem about his abilities and won't let him down like Mr. Awesome and Dr. Terfenpeltz did. A smart guy is nothing without a 99 by his side.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Awesomes, "Destination Deading"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

The superhero sitcom The Awesomes, about a cash-poor team of misfits and their equally inept adversaries, is easily the best of Hulu's batch of original animated shows--a batch of mostly horrendous, often Canadian-made shows. I can't say The Awesomes is a great show quite yet, but it might be getting there. The first season of The Awesomes was marred by animation by Bento Box that was as rough-looking as the Burbank and Atlanta animation studio's work on Bob's Burgers was during that now-great Fox show's first season, as well as the stilted, Jerry Seinfeld-during-Seinfeld-ish voice acting of Awesomes co-creator Seth Meyers, whose previous experience with the superhero genre was co-writing a Spider-Man comic with Awesomes co-star Bill Hader. In the second season, Meyers has clearly been growing a little more comfortable with the voice work, plus Bento Box is starting to play around more with shadows and shading, so The Awesomes has been looking less and less like a visually flat Flash webtoon from 2004.

Meyers and co-creator Mike Shoemaker just need to ditch the annoying device of having Meyers' neurotic and meek team leader character Prock always use his superpower of freezing time, not to perform heroic tasks but to monologue, and not to the audience like how Zack Morris monologued on Saved by the Bell but to himself for some weird reason (perhaps Meyers is trying to avoid making Prock resemble Zack by having him talk to himself, but it just continues to remind me of Zack). The big running joke in these time-freezing scenes is that there's always some sort of dangling opportunity for Prock--who has to follow his doctor's orders about not using his superpower for too long because it gives him nosebleeds--to make that superpower useful, but he keeps ignoring it. It's a good running joke that's reminiscent of self-important Maxwell Smart's ineptitude on Get Smart, but it can't disguise the fact that these scenes are such a clunky exposition device (Jody Schaeffer and George Krstic were better at the self-monologuing thing when Coop always did it in the middle of robot battles on Megas XLR). The device shows up in every Awesomes episode, and it briefly mars "Destination Deading," a solid Awesomes episode that riffs on both Andy Serkis' unexpectedly popular Planet of the Apes prequels and the absurdities of expensive and tedious destination weddings, from $800-a-night hotel rooms to $18 glasses of lemon water.

Recently on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host told the audience that much of "Destination Deading" was lifted from an Awesomes staff writer's terrible experience as a guest at a destination wedding. "One of the writers said, 'Oh, [the Awesomes] should have to go to a destination wedding, and that will be worse than any supervillain they've ever fought because nothing's worse than when you get invited to a destination wedding.' And what made that hard for me to hear was he had been a guest of mine at my destination wedding," said Meyers.

The Awesomes co-creator's willingness to make fun of himself and own up to the mistakes he and his bride put their wedding guests through ("It was a nightmare. We were awful people," added Meyers) is one of a few reasons why I can't get mad at The Awesomes, even whenever Prock is awkwardly rattling off exposition to himself or when Prock, who's saddled with daddy issues, and his season 2 nemesis Malocchio Jr. (Will Forte)--the Black Canary-inspired accountant son of Malocchio (Hader, terrific as always), season 1's big bad (and now maybe a season 2 ally)--both come off as Venture Bros. lite. Another thing that helps The Awesomes through its rough spots is the simple fact that the members of the Awesomes are likable without being bland, as well as flawed without being as detestable as the characters of Hulu's other animated shows Fugget About It and Mother Up!, which both follow the increasingly hackneyed "let's make everybody an asshole for the sake of shock value" model of animated comedy.

Impresario (Kenan Thompson), a magician-themed hero saddled with a smothering mom (also voiced by Thompson), Concierge (Emily Spivey), Gadget Gal (Paula Pell) and Sumo (Bobby Lee) are my favorites of the team (which, fortunately, is as diverse as Meyers' unexpectedly diverse Late Night writing staff). Impresario's Green Lantern-style constructs always take the shape of his mom, and they're an amusing and effective running gag (Impresario's construct in "Destination Deading" turns into a mash-up of Mom and Godzilla, complete with Japanese lettering beside her). The Awesomes' efficient secretary Concierge--who was promoted to official Awesomes team member in the last episode despite not having any superpowers and was also given a snazzy new jumpsuit to replace her standard secretary outfit--borders on Mary Sue territory. But Spivey--a veteran SNL writer who created and then fled the sinking ship known as Up All Night and was recently involved with the equally troubled How I Met Your Dad pilot that didn't sell--imbues Concierge with a nicely irascible Southern voice that keeps the character from being Blandy McPerfectshoes.

Enjoyable voice work by another veteran SNL writer--Pell, who wrote two of my favorite SNL commercial parodies, Litter Critters and Homocil--also distinguishes Gadget Gal, an elderly heroine in a rejuvenated body that's modeled after the look of the '40s Silk Spectre from Watchmen. And Daily Beast contributor and Jeopardy! champ Arthur Chu has been wishing for an Asian Hulk (after Marvel gender-swapped Thor and made Captain America black) because Hulk's identity crisis reminds him so much of the cultural baggage of being an Asian American male who's constantly stereotyped and emasculated, but Chu clearly hasn't been aware that The Awesomes already features an Asian Hulk. He's in the form of 11-year-old Tim, a.k.a. Sumo, a mash-up of Hulk (brute strength) and Shazam (a little boy in a big guy's body).

Scripted by Dan Levy, "Destination Deading" continues the running joke of everyone on the team (except for Ike Barinholtz's supportive best friend character Muscleman and Taran Killam's deferential-to-Prock speedster Frantic) finding Prock to be a dorky stick in the mud, exemplified in this episode by the schmoopy talk between Prock and his new lawyer girlfriend Jaclyn Stone (Meyers' old Weekend Update partner Amy Poehler). But the team's dislike of Prock's mushy phone conversations with Jaclyn is immediately outweighed by their dislike of the overpriced drinks and suites during the wedding of Muscleman's sister Abby (Meyers' old Chicago improv partner Jill Benjamin), who had an unrequited crush on Prock and isn't quite over him, and David Apelstein, a mild-mannered chiropractor from the ape nation of Apesylvania. An Awesomes episode wouldn't be complete without a battle between superheroes and supervillains, so "Destination Deading" pits the team against the groom's grumpy uncle Elliot Levy-Apelstein (Colin Quinn), who uses his nephew's wedding to plot an ape uprising against humans.

Absent from this episode is Hotwire (Rashida Jones), an Awesomes member who turned out last season to be a reluctant mole for her dad Malocchio and is currently thought to be dead by her teammates, including Prock, who fell in love with her. Rescued off-screen by drunken Teleportation Larry (Bobby Moynihan), Hotwire has kept herself hidden and is pretending to be a male armored hero named Metal Fella. Jones excels at playing awkward--one of my favorite Jones scenes on Parks and Recreation had Ann Perkins trying and failing to bond with Ron Swanson's little stepdaughters--so Hotwire's awkward attempts at dudebro talk with Prock while she was suited up as Metal Fella last week marked the first time that this show has used Jones really well as a voice actor. Also absent from "Destination Deading" is Bob's Burgers voice actor Dan Mintz, who joined the Awesomes writing staff this season and voiced several different side characters in the episode he wrote, "Hotwire's Funeral," so it was kind of bizarre to hear Tina Belcher's voice--which is basically Mintz's normal speaking voice--popping up on another show and emanating from people who don't look like Tina. But "Destination Deading" is worthwhile for nailing the tediousness of weddings, especially destination weddings. "It's like a vacation, but at an inconvenient time, twice as expensive, not where you actually want to go," grumbles Concierge, "and instead of having a vacation, you go to a wedding." I've never been invited to a destination wedding, but if I had to pay $18 for a glass of water, I'd rather stay parched.

Wow, Ben Wyatt's taste in music on Parks and Rec is... so Ben Wyatt

In last week's Parks and Rec, April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) was trapped in a car in sweltering D.C. weather with her boss, congressional campaign manager and Star Trek: TNG fanfic author Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), and she glumly glared at the camera as she regretted putting on one of Ben's mix CDs, which he called "Benji's Cool Times Summer Jamz Mix." The audience heard only one of Ben's jams, Salt-N-Pepa's "Shoop"--as did April, whose consciousness must have left her body by the time that Salt thanks her boo's mother for a butt like that--and now the show's official Facebook page has gone the extra mile and posted the rest of Ben's "Summer Jamz Mix" on Spotify.

These are songs you play at a wedding, where overplayed pop songs go to die and where "Call Me Maybe" and "Gangnam Style" will go to die soon. The uptight Ben is like a Top 40 station stuck in 1996.

I love the attention to detail regarding the characters' musical tastes on Parks and Rec. Ben's CD collection in his car consists mostly of '90s mixtape-style soundtrack albums like the Pulp Fiction CD because Ben loves how those albums are like mixtapes from his favorite directors, a detail that seems to be lifted from Scott's past as a teenage film geek. The actor has admitted in interviews that he admired filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee so much as a teen that instead of bedroom posters of athletes or half-naked starlets, which is what most teenage guys prefer, Scott would put pictures and clippings of his favorite directors up on his bedroom wall.

The apathetic and snooty April is a Neutral Milk Hotel fan, just like Parks showrunner Michael Schur. Her not-too-bright husband Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt) leads the unsigned Pawnee rock band Mouse Rat, which, according to its fake site, "takes inspiration from the greats--Dave Matthews Band, Counting Crows, and recent (but solid) discovery Train--and then spins it out of control" (I once had a job where I had to rummage through small-town rock band sites and post links to them on my company's sites, and all those bands' bios of themselves sounded exactly like Mouse Rat's, especially during the description of acts like Train as "great"). Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), who's unabashed about his libertarian politics, isn't as unabashed about his secret off-hours life as saxman and Eagleton smooth jazz sensation Duke Silver, a hit with the (older) ladies of Eagleton. Former Entertainment 720 CEO Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), an Indian American who thinks he's the Diddy of Pawnee and lists Flo Rida as one of his heroes, has, of course, a weakness for the Dirty South sound and '90s R&B.







Like April, Tom finds Ben to be terminally uncool. I wonder what Tom's reaction to Ben's "Summer Jamz" CD would be (Tom would probably say, "You still listen to CDs? Ha!"). I also wonder what a Tom Haverford Spotify playlist would look like. It would likely include Soulja Boy's "Turn My Swag On," which Tom rapped along to at the Snakehole Lounge while kickin' it with former Indiana Pacer Detlef Schrempf, and T-Pain's "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)," which Tom briefly sang while in costume as T-Pain.

(Photo source: Uproxx)

But what would the rest of that playlist look like? It's time to step into Tom's mind and think like a man who thinks he's so baller.

"Joints That Tom Haverford Probably Bumps on His iPhone" tracklist
1. Soulja Boy Tell'em, "Turn My Swag On"
2. T-Pain featuring Mike Jones, "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)"
3. Montell Jordan, "This Is How We Do It"
4. Fat Joe featuring Lil Wayne, "Make It Rain"
5. Ginuwine, "Pony"
6. Ginuwine, "Differences"
7. R. Kelly, "You Remind Me of Something"
8. R. Kelly featuring Ronald and Ernie Isley, "Down Low (Nobody Has to Know)"
9. The Isley Brothers featuring R. Kelly and Chanté Moore, "Contagious"
10. R. Kelly, "Summer Bunnies"
11. R. Kelly, "Ignition Remix"
12. Jodeci, "Get on Up"
13. Johnny Gill, "Rub You the Right Way"
14. H-Town, "Part Time Lover"
15. The-Dream featuring T.I., "Make Up Bag"
16. Jay-Z, "Change Clothes"
17. Mystikal featuring Nivea, "Danger (Been So Long)"
18. Ludacris, "Southern Hospitality"
19. Rick Ross featuring Styles P, "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)"
20. Flo Rida featuring T-Pain, "Low"
21. Jamie Foxx featuring T-Pain, "Blame It"
22. Waka Flocka Flame, "Hard in Da Paint"
23. Jay-Z and Kanye West, "Otis" (the video even features a cameo by Ansari as Tom)
24. Kanye West, Big Sean, Pusha T and 2 Chainz, "Mercy"
25. Kanye West, Jay-Z and Big Sean, "Clique"

(Photo source: Flavorwire)